Ordinary Trauma

About this book

"Jennifer Sinor has built a creative memoir out of interwoven but episodic vignettes (linked flashes, as she calls them) drawn from a transient childhood dictated by the life of a troubling and troubled military father. Her focus is on traumatic events, which though a number of them seem more than ordinary by many measures, are presented as such by means of precise, luminescent prose that by its very restraint and lack of affect magnifies its impact. In this author's hands, understatement proves an effective method of engaging and holding readers: surprising, or shocking, through sudden reiterations of trauma disrupting quotidian lives, not itself unusual yet always unique in specifics and variable in consequences. This creates tension in anticipation of the next disruption, which is perhaps unexpected in its particulars but now expectable and hence recognizable as ordinary, as it is also recognizable through the knowledge that stumbling into and navigating distress, pain, and shock is normal in living, even if all trauma is not the same in terms of damage or of negotiation by the traumatized"--Provided by publisher.